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\title{Multi-Agent Autonomous Mapping}
\author{Tanay Shah \and Aaron Fineman}

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For our final project, we would like to create a simulation of a multi-agent autonomous mapping system. Our agents will make use of a distributed control algorithm that receives external commands. The overall goal of our project will be to map a building that has undergone a catastrophe. The robots will update the blueprint with locations of obstructions and fire, and try to locate any survivors. Our main concern is the scalability of our algorithm across one, several, and many sized systems.

We have had to make several assumptions to constrain our problem space. The main ones we have are that we know the blueprint of the building in advance, and that it is fairly up to date. In addition, the robots will have limited communication range to simulated wireless communications in a non-ideal environment. A second constraint we added is that this is occurring on a single large floor, rather than worrying about simulating stairs and intra-floor communication. We are starting by placing all the robots immediately inside the main door and then activating them.

Our initial plan (with minimal background research) is to create a four dimensional map of obstructions we encounter. The axes we would like to use are X, Y, certainty, and fire. X and Y would line up with X and Y on the blueprint, and certainty and fire would be percents from 00 to FF detailing how certain the agent is of obstructions and how bad the fire is. This allows the agent to integrate other's maps into it's own knowledge base with different trust-values, and for it's certainty of obstructions to decay over time (it's more likely for collapses to increase over time, not clear out). Fire both allows an agent to mark fire-obstructions and lets it guess how the fire is spreading. This can allow the agent to predict the likely danger of areas, and prioritize areas that may become blocked off.

This four dimensional map can be easily encoded into a bitmap storing the additional axes in the RGB values. This has the interesting side effect of being easily visualizeable.
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